


You Always Hurt the One You Love

by thelightninginme



Series: Once I Was Loved [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Mid-Credits Scene, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, brief mention of suicidal thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 03:16:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15087815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelightninginme/pseuds/thelightninginme
Summary: "Can you stop being Captain America for a goddamn second and let me make my first real choice in seventy years?” And there’s the salvo.Just like that, all the fight goes out of Steve like a popped balloon.Bucky considers the best bad choice, and tries to make Steve understand.





	You Always Hurt the One You Love

**Author's Note:**

> As part of my post-Infinity War recovery I rewatched Civil War for the first time in a while and I still think the mid-credits scene is just not done in a way that makes sense in terms of character or storytelling. So I set out to add a little context to the scene. 
> 
> After the first Avengers movie came out, my sister and I worked on an Assassin's Creed crossover for a hot second. 2012 was a simpler time. Other than that, this is my first foray into this fandom, so please be nice. :)

_You always hurt the one you love_

_The one you shouldn’t hurt at all_

_You always take the sweetest rose_

_And crush it till the petals fall_

_You always break the kindest hearts_

_With a hasty word you can’t recall_

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes in restraints and his first sense is not anger or fear, but a kind of tired acceptance. Like, _oh, it’s this again._

But then he becomes aware that someone’s yelling. Multiple people are yelling. Some of them sound angry. Mostly, they sound afraid. The only voice among them that he knows sounds downright terrified.

“Bucky! God damn it, come _back_ \- ”

He does. All at once, crashing into himself. He’s flat on his back, tile cold against his skull. Steve’s anxious face clicks into place above him. “Steve?”

Steve’s eyes squeeze shut and then flutter open again, so fast Bucky almost misses it. Other voices, other faces bob around in the background, ones he doesn’t know. “Give us some space,” Steve grinds out over his shoulder. “It’s fine. I’ve got it from here.”

Oh. No wonder he thought he was in restraints. He’s got all of Captain America sitting astride him.

“What did I do?” he gasps.

“Nothing. God. Bucky, you didn’t do anything. You didn’t make it out of the apartment.” What apartment? Brooklyn, Bucharest? No, these gleaming tile floors. Wakanda. Steve is bleeding freely again from the cut above his eye, the one Stark gave him.

“What did I do,” he gasps again, like a prayer.

“Nothing,” Steve says again, firmer this time. “This’ll be healed by tomorrow. Breathe, Buck. Just breathe.”

_Rattling coughs from October through March. C’mon, Steve, you have to breathe._

“I remember saying that to you a lot.”

Steve laughs wetly and finally rolls off him. Bucky drags himself into a sitting position, propped against the wall. Steve follows suit. The two of them are sitting just beneath an open window. The cool breeze that filters in is welcome, but he doesn’t remember it being there before. What he does remember is the cacophony of shattering glass.

“You tossed a chair through the window and tried to jump,” Steve explains. “I tackled you and I guess it knocked your head back into place.”

“I’ll pay for it,” Bucky croaks to no one in particular.

“With what, the rainy day stash under your mattress?” There’s a harsh bite to the words that Bucky wasn’t expecting. When he turns to look at Steve, he’s got his head tipped back against the wall, his eyes closed. “Has that ever happened before?” Steve asks.

“No. Not like…no.” Waking up confused, disoriented, without a sense of time or place? Yes. Waking up in full Winter Soldier mode? No.

“Any idea what happened?”

“I fell asleep.” That he remembers, because his last conscious thought was that he couldn’t remember the last time he slept in a real, clean bed. “I - dreamed…I don’t know what, exactly. Somebody was yelling the trigger words. I think - I was saying them.”

Steve goes very still beside him. “It was just a nightmare, Bucky,” he says quietly, in a half-hearted attempt at the Captain America voice.

Bucky draws his knees to his chest and drops his forehead. “That’s how - that’s how deep they are in my head. I can’t even trust myself to _sleep.”_ When he finally lifts his head, clear-eyed, he turns to Steve. “I should’ve gone back under as soon as we got here.”

“You heard that.”

After days of beating on and being beat on they’d both needed a good once-over in the medical center attached to the palace. One of the doctors had spoken to Steve about it, in hushed tones. They had their own cryo facilities, staffed by some of the most advanced minds in science and medicine, minds that could go rooting around in Bucky’s without destroying the semblance of self that he managed to reassemble after DC. And at that moment, Bucky understood why T’Challa was so quick to offer them sanctuary. “Super-hearing,” he tells Steve, tapping his ear.

“There was no reason to talk about it, especially not then,” Steve protests, gearing up for an argument. Bucky can practically see him lining up the arguments against cryo like tin toy soldiers. “We both needed a break. I didn’t want to upset you.”

“You didn’t want me to go Winter Soldier.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth. The hell kind of friend would I be if I suggested you go through that again?”

“Sure, it’s shitty, but it’s the only choice and you know it.” Who will out-stubborn the other? They’ve both been through this song and dance plenty of times before, even if Bucky is a little out of practice.

“Why are you trying so hard to pick a fight with me over this?”

“Because you’re not listening, Steve,” he grinds out.

“You’ve broken out of it three times now. You’re getting better.”

The laugh that tears out of his throat is harsh and he can see Steve wince out of the corner of his eye.

“No. No - you drop me to the floor and I snap out of it. You drop a helicopter on my head and I snap out of it. You drop a helicarrier on my head and I snap out of it. Are you not seeing the pattern here? I can’t break free without you, and without something getting broken, and without me almost killing you in the process. And you can’t stay because you can’t leave your friends in prison, and I can’t go with you because I’m a liability in all kinds of ways. From where I’m sitting, we’re out of options. I go back under.”

“So what if you do go back under and it turns out there’s nothing they can do for you? If they can’t figure it out.”

“Then I’ll put a goddamn bullet in my brain and be done with it,” he snaps. They taught him a thousand and one ways to kill a person, and sometimes he marvels at the fact that he hasn’t managed to do it to himself yet.

“I didn’t go through all of this for you to _kill_ yourself,” comes Steve’s heated response. Anger is Steve’s automatic response to hurt, as automatic for him as breathing. The rational part of Bucky knows that hurting Steve will not make him a better listener, but the wounded part of him is feeding off his own frustration, the frustration of being denied the human experience of making his own decisions. Even the decisions that hurt.

“I just - I can’t do this anymore.” He gestures to the broken furniture tossed around. They are supposed to be guests here. “I can’t wake up not knowing what I did. What if I kill somebody next time?”

“You said you don’t do that anymore. You’re not giving yourself enough credit.”

“You aren’t giving me any credit!” Bucky snaps. “Can you stop being Captain America for a goddamn second and let me make my first real choice in seventy years?” And there’s the salvo. Steve’s toy soldiers lay scattered on the floor.

Just like that, all the fight goes out of Steve like a popped balloon.

_They’d nearly come to blows once over whether to buy the yellow balloon or the red one. In the end they compromised on green but then Steve tripped and the string slipped out of his sweaty palms and Bucky made a desperate leap for it but then the wind picked up and carried it up and away and they just stood there, shoulder to shoulder on the boardwalk, watching it drift up further and further until it was a tiny dot in the sky and even then they stared at the place where it had been -_

That’s the thing that drives him crazy about this, about his broken brain. These are the memories that float to the surface, while things like his own mother’s face remain shadowy and amorphous.

For a long time, there is no sound except the occasional bird call or laughing voice coming in from the window.

“Just… from where I’m sitting, it feels like you’re giving up too soon,” Steve says quietly.

Once again Bucky rests his forehead on his knees. “Giving is up is what I did when they told me you were dead,” he mumbles into his lap.

Steve does not answer, but Bucky hears his sharp intake of breath.

It was a memory that came back to him, after D.C., in bits and pieces, yes, but still, it was the first thing he remembered with any clarity. A hurt buried deep beneath years of pain; a less sharp ache, maybe, but something that went bone deep. “It was the worst thing they did to me. It was all pretty vanilla torture at first. Then they came in and told me you were dead.” He raises his head and Steve is staring at him, still as a statue except for the muscle in his jaw working non-stop.

“I thought it was their new tactic. ‘You’re lying,’ I said. ‘Prove it,’ I said. So. They did. Brought me every newspaper in every language they could find. Even wheeled in a projector to show me the newsreel of Peggy all wobbly, telling everyone what a hero you were.”

“ _You understand now, Sergeant. No one is coming for you this time.”_

Zola was almost kind when he said it.

They never let him cry again after that day. The memory hurts, but it’s like a side stitch after running too hard. A memory that reminds him of what it is to be alive. And it’s the clearest memory he has of whoever he was back then, of Steve’s Bucky. So he treasures it for that alone, holds it like a live flame in his hands that warms even as it burns.

“That was giving up,” he says, voice thick. “This isn’t the same thing.”

The pressure of Steve’s weight against his wrecked left shoulder hurts, but it’s a grounding kind of pain and so he says nothing. Steve is trembling against him, whether from tears or rage or both Bucky isn’t sure.

But when Steve speaks next his voice only trembles a little. “I should’ve gone after you when I had the chance. You deserved a proper burial. Your family deserved it. I never - I should’ve realized you might’ve lived.”

 _He let me fall_ , Bucky wrote in one of the notebooks, and then promptly scribbled it out the next morning in a brief moment of clarity. Even then, with barely any sense of self, he knew that Steve would try to take this one on his shoulders, and even then he knew he didn’t want him to. “You know that’s not on you,” Bucky says. And it hits him that Steve is rejecting the idea of Bucky going back into cryo because he sees it as a failure of his own. You can’t save him now, like you couldn’t save him then. “This isn’t giving up,” Bucky says again, because even though he can hardly afford to trust his own mind, this is one thing he’s sure about, and he needs Steve to know it too.

Steve straightens and scrubs a hand over his face. “I know. I get that. Just…I’m going to miss you.”

“I did miss you. Even when I couldn’t understand what it was I was missing,” Bucky murmurs. And that’s when Steve goes in for the hug, awkward and one-armed, but fierce all the same.

 

* * *

 

 

“We’re ready when you are. Take all the time you need.”

Bucky nods at the scientist, focusing on her kind eyes and gentle tone; anything to keep from looking at Steve, stone faced, that muscle in his jaw working again.

“Seems like they know what they’re doing here,” Steve remarks, tone brittle, as the doctor’s team bustles around the room, his gaze firmly avoiding the cryo chamber.

“Even if - even if they get this stuff out of me, I’ll never be him again,” Bucky blurts out, even though Steve visibly flinches when he says it.

The night Bucky made his choice, neither of them slept very much. Steve spoke aimlessly - about his friends, about battling aliens in Manhattan, about their lives before the war. Bucky stayed quiet, mostly, save the occasional quiet interjection when he actually remembered something, and every time he did Steve’s whole face lit up, and it hurt every single time.

“I know that,” Steve says sharply, a little too quickly, and Bucky realizes this is a conversation he’s had before - maybe with Sam, maybe with himself. Steve exhales slowly. “But I guess…I won’t be the same, either.” Jesus, but he looks tired, wrung out and exhausted in a way that Bucky hasn’t seen since before the serum.

Bucky wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. _This is why I didn’t want you to find me,_ he wants to shout. _This is why I lied about remembering you. No matter how this goes, you get hurt._ But all he manages is a strangled, “I’m sorry.”

“What? No, don’t - you don’t have anything to be sorry for.” Steve seems to shake himself out of his thoughts and puts a hand on Bucky’s shoulder shoulder and squeezes gently. “It’s not about me. It’s - whatever you have to do, I’m behind you, one hundred percent. Bucky. You know that, right?”

If Steve goes in for the hug, all of Bucky’s resolve is going to shatter into a million pieces. He tenses like a frightened animal. “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m asleep,” he says, voice like thin ice.

Steve just smiles sadly and gives his shoulder a little shake. “I’ll save it for when you’re awake.”

And that’s the point where he tells them all he’s ready, because he’s about as ready as he can be, and because he doesn’t want to cry in front of all these strangers, and because he wants to be awake again, he wants to be better.

It will be very gentle, they told him, that it wouldn’t feel any different than falling asleep and waking naturally. ‘Not like before’ remains unsaid.

Not at all like before. Bucky’s keeps his gaze locked on Steve’s face, anguished and furious and gentle and hopeful all at once, until his eyes drift closed and it’s time to rest.

 

* * *

 

 

_So if I broke your heart last night_

_It’s because I love you most of all._


End file.
